The most valuable single sheet of paper
in all of direct marketing is a letter. Creating and sending a good letter can
create 40 percent to 50 percent more sales than just a brochure. It can warm
the coldest of customers, pave the way for an easy entrance to a client that
is tough to get a hold of, and soften the hardest entrance barriers to allow
you to make a sale. For more information, see Create
a Direct Mail Package.

If structured correctly, the sales letter can be
one of the best selling tools in an arsenal of sales weapons. Uses for sales letters
include:

As a broad direct mail solicitation letter sent
to previously uncontacted prospects to generate a call with interest or complete a sale

To reply to an inquiry from either a direct mail
solicitation or advertisement in a magazine

As a way to follow up with a known prospect you
may or may not have spoken to on the phone

As a way to follow up after a meeting or phone
conversation to enhance the impression of thoroughness of your firm

As a thank you for good work, kindness or
referral

As a confirmation of understanding of agreement

But is that sales letter youre sending to 100 inquirers really a letter? Not
always. A letter is a personal communication between two people. If your sales letter goes
to 10, 10,000, or 10 million people, its really a highly stylized ad designed to
look like a letter. If you were thinking of dashing it off in a few moments, forget it.
Like any great ad copy, take your time and go through several drafts to make sure the
final copy is perfect.

The letter will have the highest readership of
all the elements in your direct mail package. Customers look at the brochure, but they
read the letter. Better make it a great one. Lets take a deeper look at the
structure of these letters.

Sales letters usually have primary
and secondary objectives. The primary objective of a letter is usually not to
sell a product, but to generate a phone call. The toughest objective is to sell
directly without further contact or human intervention. It would be great to
close a sale by just sending a sheet of paper, but unless your sales piece is
aimed at a direct sale from the get-go, its not likely. Generating some
interest  or a phone call  is first. Selling a product off a page,
which is particularly difficult, is usually a secondary or tertiary objective.

Getting the prospect to call you is the most
common objective of a sales letter. Another common objective is a letter with a passive
objective  an introductory letter creating a warm environment for the customer to
call  which alerts the reader of your presence and interest in doing business with
him, and that you will be calling. This is frequently used in a mail piece that you send
to a warm market, such as prospects who have responded to your magazine ad by a
readers response service card.

Another common objective of a sales letter is to
lay the groundwork to set up an appointment, since telephone or face-to-face selling can
be more personal, and buying signals become clearer and more apparent. Here the primary
objective is to set up a warm reception to a phone call from you. The secondary objective
may be to introduce you, your company and your products, or to introduce a new product,
pricing special or other limited time offer. These reasons imply why its so
important for you to speak with the reader in a timely fashion. With this passive
objective, you need to explain in writing that you will be calling and why it is in their
best interest to receive your call.

Stating, "I will call you," in the
letter is strategic and necessary for two reasons: (1) The customer now knows he must look
over your material in greater depth so that he may speak intelligently to you about it.
(2) He must figure out if he wants to see you in person or ignore the doorbell or warn his
secretary to fend off your call.

The most difficult type of selling
on the planet is trying to get a person to buy from a page in a magazine. In
a magazine, there are other pages with ads competing for your customers
eyes and attention. There are even other ads on your own page competing for
your customers eyes and attention. With the turn of a page, in just a
second or two, your best ad is history  if the customer has even opened
the magazine at all that month. The real advantage of placing ads in magazines
is they have tremendous reach. For every person who missed your ad, there may
be 1,000 who saw it. While it will probably cost you 50 cents to reach someone
with a piece of direct mail, in a magazine you can reach thousands of prospects,
usually at a rate of $15 to $40 per thousand.

Although the cost-per-thousand (CPM) is much
greater, with targeted direct mail (including direct-selling letters), you can be much
more precise and hand pick your targets  and thus limit your wasted advertising
exposure and expense. You also have the undivided attention of your reader, for as long as
you keep his interest  which may be several seconds or 20 pages. These are the
advantages of using direct mail as a prospecting and selling tool. In addition, an
effective letter will warm up a cool prospect for your phone call, while the best ad, even
the best brochure, may still leave prospects cold.

Direct sales letters solicit orders or their
mission fails, and so does your investment. These letters are longer, harder selling, and
more powerfully written  designed to make a person place some hard-earned dollars in
an envelope and wave goodbye to it as he places it in his mailbox or to make a reluctant
customer call with a credit card. Not an easy task, and tough to do with a one-page
letter, especially when the product or supplier is not a known entity. A smooth, well
written sales letter must overcome the fears and the objections of buyers, and raise their
confidence and level of trust enough to buy. To succeed, this letter must have the reader
take a proactive role, pick up the phone and initiate the call.

Sometimes, the objective is not to
garner a sale directly from the letter, but, rather, to request that the reader
call to set up an appointment. These, letters, while not as hard-selling as
a product pitch, still need to sell the benefits of the product and tell the
reader to pick up the phone and call, or the letter's goal is not met. Like
sales letters, they must be well-written and must begin to overcome the fears
and objections of buyers by gaining their trust and interest.

Heres the specifics of how to
create call generation, passive-appointment and direct-selling types of sales
letters.

Your goals are accomplished by showing the
reader the benefits of the product. Letters are appealing only if the reader sees what's
in it for him, right from the start. Copy is drafted from the perspective of the reader.
"I will send you"  which addresses matters in terms of what the sender
will do, is not as appealing as "You will receive." The readers needs and
wants are discussed in terms of him.

Every sales letter, like every other piece of
business writing, starts the same way: Write your objective in the upper right hand corner
of a blank sheet of paper. Constantly refer to this to keep your writing focused. Armed
with your objectives such as "generate call," or "sell product
directly," pick up your pen and draw a line down the center of a clean sheet of
paper. On the left, write the features of your products, on the right write the benefits
these features bring to the customer. Features are what the product has, benefits are the
things that are derived from the features by the customer. In the letter, you must sell
the benefits. After all, people dont buy a fishing pole because its made from
fiberglass; they buy it because it catches more fish for them. With all your benefits
written on the page before you, prioritize them.

The secret of a successful direct mail
letter is to soft sell the benefits of the product, and sell the call hard.
To start your letter, follow this simple rule: Write 100 lines, and then go
back and pick out the best one. Thats how important the opening line is.
If this single line doesnt interest the reader and force him to continue,
your response just went down the tubes with the rest of your mailing package
 and your money. Electrify your opening. The only function of your opening
is to create interest and draw the reader in.

This same rule is used for the teaser copy on
the envelope. If your letter is personalized, and the envelope is printed with the
recipients name and address (not a label), no teaser copy may be necessary.
"Gift Certificate Enclosed!" is a great teaser because (1) Its inexpensive
to print, (2) Its cheap to redeem, (3) Theres no cost to you if its not
redeemed, (4) It ships flat and is lightweight, (5) It has a high perceived value, (6) It
can be targeted to merchandise you wish to dispose of and (7) Its easy to track.

In the second paragraph, explode with your
biggest benefit. Dont wait until further in the letter because youll have lost
the reader by then. Expand your biggest benefit in this and the following paragraph. If
you have secondary benefits, bring them in here too.

If you have numerous benefits, create a bulleted
list and insert it in the center of the page. Bulleted lists have high readership values
in a letter  almost everyone likes and reads a bulleted list.

Now, start selling. Tell readers exactly what
you want them to do. If youre writing a sales letter to get an appointment or to
sell something that is pretty expensive and will take several contacts, start selling the
phone call: "In a brief phone call to you, Ill show you exactly where you can
save 40 percent ..."

When the objective is to have readers call,
offer them a non-threatening reason to call. This can be an offer for a free brochure,
free information, free informational booklet, free quote, free estimate, etc. "Call
and get" is an effective phrase in sales letters. Once the readers call, the goal of
the mail piece has been fulfilled, and its now up to you to guide the phone call to
fulfill the independent objective of the phone call  whether to secure an
appointment, close a sale, or leave the door open for further contact.

If your letter is to sell a product directly,
spend an additional paragraph or two on the benefits of owning and using the product, but
in the end, sell the phone call fairly hard: "Just pick up the phone and call right
now  get this ... "

The closer you can come to making your sales letter like a
letter, the more credibility youll have. But always remember its
your ad. Start on letterhead and use a friendly, warm salutation like "Dear
Colleague," or "Dear Neighbor and Friend," or "Dear Pharmacist
and Friend," or, if you can afford it, the actual name from the mailing
list.

To get your letter read by the widest audience,
it should look easy to read even if it isnt. Start with a one- or two-line opening
paragraph (hopefully this copy will tie in to the teaser copy on your envelope.) Indent
all paragraphs four spaces, and keep all paragraphs to less than seven lines in length.
Use short sentences with simple words. Set copy flush-left, ragged-right  never
justify. Its OK to use bold and underlining sparingly  like once in a
paragraph. Italics can be used with slightly greater frequency since it blends in better.
Words in all caps can be used once on each page, twice at most.

To the right of your letterhead, place one or
two short lines of copy that are designed to highlight the offer or immediately interest
the reader. These lines should be short and not extend too far into the center of the
page. This area is called the Johnson Box, named after Bob Johnson who pioneered direct
mail selling in the mid-'60s.

Personalization of the salutation is expensive,
but makes the reader feel he or she is the only person in the world that is receiving this
piece of correspondence. It should be used on all sales letters where a follow-up will be
made by phone and/or the goal is to close an appointment.

Personalization in direct-selling letters
usually pulls more orders than non-personalized mail. It can make the letter look
like it just came off a typewriter and sounds like it was just sent to one person. If you
can deliver that feel, and you have a very targeted list or your selling price is high
 it may be worth it. Even if your letter is purely commercial  printed and
mailed to the masses  somewhere in the back of the readers mind he may know
its a direct mail letter, but somehow its still read as a personal letter to
him. Thats the power of a letter, that personal one-to-one feel.

Although you may have 300 fonts in your
computer, use a plain font like Courier or Times New Roman in 12-point size to make it
look like a personal letter. To break up the letter visually so it doesnt appear
boring, use a foreshortened paragraph in the middle of the letter by moving both margins
in to create a paragraph thats just four inches wide. This paragraph can be set in a
smaller font size, italics (my personal favorite) or a different typeface.

Sign with a legible signature. Dont forget
an electric "P.S." Since the P.S. is a well read part of any letter, make it
sizzle: Offer a guarantee, recap your offer, and tell them why they should pick up the
phone and call right away. Give the phone number again, and finish up with a thank you.

Your letter may be of any length as long as
its interesting. Theres no such thing as a letter that is too long, only too
dull. The biggest danger, though, is reader fall-off. Suggestion? Keep it crisp by editing
severely and following what I call the Two-Paragraph Rule of readership survival: Your
readership will fall off dramatically when there are two paragraphs back to back that are
not interesting. While a three-page letter may be too long and get tossed, three one-page
letters will more likely get read. Consider sending more than one letter for any big
dollar amount sale, or to build loyalty or credibility into a campaign.

Recap:

Start with a written objective

Make it look like a letter

Write a one- or two-line synopsis in a Johnson
Box

Warm salutation

Compelling, electric one- or two-line opening
paragraphs

State biggest benefits first; expound

Give additional benefits

Bulleted lists of benefits

Sell the call or the objective

Sell harder in direct mail order-generation
letters

Design letter to make it look easy to read.

Indent paragraphs

Flush-left, ragged-right

No paragraph over seven lines

Use bold, italics, underline and capitals
sparingly

Short words and sentences

Foreshorten a paragraph in the center

Sign legibly

Have a strong P.S. as a recap

Use white space as a design element  make
it look easy to read, even if it isnt

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